LaTeX for Philosophers

Patrick Reany

5 July 2024

The LaTeX Typesetting Language is a general purpose typesetting language. Its original primary purpose was to put mathematics into beautiful type. But as the decades have progressed from its inception, its underlying engine has remained relatively fixed, but there have been a plethora of packages added to the LaTeX system (authored by many people!) that greatly enhance its typesetting ability. Firstly, these packages add to the ability of authors to represent mathematics per se, but, secondly, also to represent related objects, such as flow charts, diagrams, even molecules.
My first disclaimer is that, although I use LaTeX practically daily, I have not published in philosophy journals. All I have to share at this point is a link or two to what others have said on the subject.
Why am I interested in whether or not philosophers publish using LaTeX? Well, recently I saw a Tim Maudlin video on the foundations to modern physics. Then, when I went to read one of his papers, called "Time Symmetric Quantum Theory Without Retrocausality," I noticed that this typeset is not LaTeX. It's not that I care whether Maudlin uses LaTeX or not, but it did surprise me, given the mathematically technical nature of the subject he was writing on.
Some interesting articles/posts can be found online at:
https://latex-ninja.com/2021/01/03/latex-for-philosophers-logic-and-other-shenannigans/
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/19551/tex-resources-for-philosophers

Is LaTeX hard to learn? It can be. I'm still learning it after three decades. But I write on a vast array of mathematical subjects. If your scope of writing is narrowly defined mathematically, it should not be hard to learn how to typeset in your niche.
What about the fact that the text editors for LaTeX do not always come with spell checkers? I use TeXWorks and it doesn't have a built-in spell checker. But Word does! So I put the entire relevant part of the TeX document into Word for it to do the spell checking. I do likewise with my HTML documents. To add a spell checker to TeXWorks, see
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/235313/how-to-add-spell-checker-to-texworks
But I don't bother with it at this point.
If you need help in using LaTeX, I suggest three resources: 1) Someone you know who will help you with it, 2) On-line help through a string search, and 3) one or more LLMs, such as Copilot or ChatGPT. (I have benefited by using these LLMs.)